#239 – MULTI-VOTING: WHEN MORE THAN ONE VOTE IS BETTER – FRED SCHENKELBERG

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In brainstorming, you may face a large number of unique ideas even after affinity diagraming. Multi-voting is a great tool to gain consensus on the top priority ideas with your team.

For less than 10 or so items we could use a rank ordering method, yet that method becomes cumbersome when there are a lot of items to prioritize. There are a couple of ways to conduct multiple-voting. Mastering this technique will help your team quickly focus on what is truly important. Continue reading

#238 – CALCULATING THE PROBABILITY OF A SAMPLE CONTAINING BAD PARTS – FRED SCHENKELBERG

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Received a question from a reader this morning that will make a nice tutorial.

A box contains 27 black and 3 red balls.  A random sample of 5 balls is drawn without replacement.  What is the probability that the sample contains one red ball?

So here’s my thinking and two ways to solve this problem. Instead of red and black balls in an urn type problem, which is pretty abstract, let’s say we know 3 bad parts are in a bin of 30 total parts. Continue reading

#235 – WHAT IS THE RELIABILITY OF THE RELIABILITY FUNCTION? – FRED SCHENKELBERG

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Review: What is the Reliability of the Reliability Function?

Jezdimir Knezevic of the MIRCE Akademy published a paper with the title above and I have a few comments.

In the article, Jezdimir suggests that the statistical approach to describing the world about us is fundamental flaws and not inherently useful for our use. He compares a mathematical/statistical approach to a scientific approach and finds the stats wanting. Continue reading

#226 – WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH DATA? – JAMES KOVACEVIC/FRED SCHENKELBERG

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A Question & Answer Period with Fred Schenkelberg and James Kovacevic on what can be done with your data and analysis.

Data and the analyses that use the data can be tricky to manage at best, let along extremely difficult.

In this last post of the series on using the maintenance data you have, Fred and James will answer many of the common questions asked about data and the analyses. Continue reading

#224 – RELIABILITY MODELING USING MONTE CARLO – FRED SCHENKELBERG

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 ABC-Fred-150x150Monte Carlo relies on data that describes the variation of elements within the system.  It also connects the elements such that their result is an estimate of performance.
For reliability modeling, this is easiest to imagine for a series system. For a system with two elements in series, a very simple reliability block diagram multiples the expected reliability for each block to determine the system reliability value. Yet, it is possible to have both elements at the low end of the range of possible reliability values, or the high end or a mix.

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